90% of U.S. Currency Laced With Cocaine

Americans love their cocaine! And apparently these same cocaine-loving Americans' preferred method of snow ingestion is to snort it through rolled up cash bills, as a new analysis of currency in 18 U.S. cities shows.

Reports the Scientific American:

"Cocaine is a powerfully addictive stimulant and one of the most commonly abused illicit drugs in the world," says chemist Yuegang Zuo of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, who conducted the tests and presented the findings today at the biannual meeting of the American Chemical Society, which is taking place in Washington, D.C. That city ranked highest in the survey-95 percent of the sampled bills there bore cocaine contamination-along with Baltimore, Boston and Detroit. Salt Lake City had the lowest average levels of contamination.

Levels of cocaine ranged from .006 micrograms to more than 1,240 micrograms-the equivalent of 50 grains of sand-on U.S. bills, and $5, $10 and $20 bills on average carried more contamination than $1 or $100 bills.

Zuo, who believes that the amount of cocaine residue present in the currency of a geographic area is in direct correlation to that area's level of drug abuse (Makes sense!), and his associates found that Asian countries collectively appear to be the least fond of cocaine, while Canadians appear to be just as fond of it as Americans, though considerably sloppier in their usage of the drug, with some bills containing as much as 2,350 micrograms of the drug. This is undoubtedly because of general Canadian laziness created socialism — Americans who have to actually work to pay for their cocaine would never be so wasteful.